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The Goode Family and Moralism
In a way, I'm kind of glad that my Goode Family ''review got delayed. I feel very nervous about it. And I've felt very nervous about a lot of reviews that turned out really good - ''Screams of Silence or Homer Badman for instance. But this review doesn't talk about a particular issue - it talks about politics in general. And talking about politics is generally a bad idea, and in the latter half of the 2010's it seems to be becoming increasingly so. But, if this review is going to work, I need to be open and honest. I generally hate talking about politics because I end up feeling either sad or angry or afraid, and it always feels like there's some kind of fight or some kind of battle to be won. Not to mention that moderates, in some circles, can be treated worse than extremists. To be forward, I am an independent centrist. Like, every political test I've taken has put me roughly there. And I skew more libertarian, but that's more anti-authoritarian. Let me put it this way - during events like the BP oil spill, I feel left-leaning. Every time I hear about the crazy shit going on in college campuses right now, I feel right-leaning. And, being honest, I feel more right-leaning than left-leaning lately with most issues. And I don't want to say that, because right-wing has become an insult in recent years. People on the left, and in left-leaning media sources use it as short-hand for backwards, intolerant, and redneck, racist, inconsiderate. And people on the left can be just as backwards and intolerant. They can be just as racist and inconsiderate. And I have plenty of problems with the right too. In fact, despite how vehemently they've come to hate each other in recent years, they've got a lot in common. Keep in mind, I'm speaking generally. Not everyone on the right or left believes these things. "We need to ban drugs, it will solve all of our problems with drugs," said the right. No, it didn't. In fact, it made all of our drug problems a lot worse. "We need to ban guns, it will solve all of our problem with guns," says the left. I have strong reason to suspect that it won't. Banning drugs lead to a lot of people being arrested and having their lives ruined due to nonviolent offenses, and it disenfranchised a lot of people, as ex-cons can legally be discriminated against and many of them cannot vote. It also really helped the drug cartels. As for guns. If you ban guns and got rid of them and dismantled the country's interest in guns, well the people who have resigned their lives to doing as much damage as possible (we call them mass shooters) would resort to using bombs, or arson - and explosions and fire can't exactly be banned. But if that's not enough for you "We need to ban this sensual image, it is indecent and immoral," says the far right. "We need to ban this sensual image, it objectifies women," says the sexually liberated far left. This is why I use a specific word when talking about how colleges treat the idea of sex in general. The word is "puritanical." It's a word that brings up the puritans, a religious group that vastly hated sex. At least that's the reputation. From the right, the message I've got about sex is that at any point you're very likely to get a nasty disease and get pregnant and abstinence until marriage. And it will destroy your life forever. From the left, the message is that any sex (even with a loving committed partner that you have been married to for years and years) can turn into rape. And it will destroy your life forever. Teenage pregnancies and rape are terrible horrible things that happen to people, and they do vastly alter lives. But both the left and the right seem to like to promote the worst aspects of sex as the most common results of sex. Also, people on the left seem to be okay with the action of masturbation but they seem to be vastly opposed to pornography, which... doesn't make much sense. I said that I feel a lot more right-leaning lately, but that's mostly because we treat the fundamentalist homophobic racist nutjobs like we should (at least if they're on the right). And you know, we see the terrible ideas from the right, like trickle-down economics, for what they were. The left has its own trickle-down economics. And it does have fundamentalist homophobic racist nutjobs. And no, they don't all live on tumblr either. My biggest problem with the left, I guess, is that every issue has become a moral battle with them. If you disagree on immigration, you're a racist. If you don't want Hillary for president, you're a sexist. If you oppose gun control, you're a crazy redneck who is paranoid about the government and is willing to let people die to protect their pride. And to their credit, that's what they've been doing for the past twenty years - fighting for gay rights and environmentalism and such. But you know what they say about "he who fights monsters." I want this to be remembered - the moral high ground is often made of pillars of salt and pillars of sand. People will do absolutely reprehensible things to prove to their peers that they are good people. Once upon a time, it was stoning the heathens and blasphemers, not to kill them, but to kill their opinions. Now, we blacklist them, hide certain views behind a curtain, deplatform them, ban them, brand them as any type of bigot, and censor them to kill their opinion. Throughout all of human history, we have been the same animals with the same chemistry and biology. We're the same animals that did the crusades. We're the same animals that did the Salem Witch Trials. The same animals that did the Inquisition. And the animals who did these things thought that they were good and right and just. Despite our more modern lives and our modern technology, we're just as prone to witch burning. We are good and moral, and the witches of the world are a plague on humanity and must be stopped by any means necessary. I repeatedly say that The Goode Family is ahead of its time in the worst ways possible. Since then, things have gotten very crazy. For example, in the show Ubuntu is a white person who wears clothing that looks like it's from Uganda. Today, he would be criticized for cultural appropriation, something that didn't exist in 2009. I'm serious. The term was conceived around 2012, and it has conflated things like wearing a kimono or sleeping with a dream catcher with things like blackface. First of all, the term "appropriation" means theft. To steal. Copying is not theft, no matter what the MPAA says. So, even if it was wrong or immoral, it would not be accurate. Second of all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Blackface was used to mock people. People do things like wear a kimono is admiration of other cultures. And learning about others brings us all closer. Then again, there a lot of people (especially in colleges) demanding segregation. We had that in the 50's and the 60's. Do you know why the civil rights movement opposed that? Because the things that were labeled "black only" were inferior to the things labeled "white only" - they had worse upkeep, they were made cheaper. So, if society really is biased against women or ethnic minorities or sexual minorities, why are you asking society for your own spaces. If society really does hate you, do you think you're going to get things of equal quality? That's not how segregation works. The preferred group will always get the better quality stuff. But here's a term I'd like to coin - ancestor shaming. Because you think that my ancestors did some horrible thing, I owe reparations. I mean, I am a white male. I'm also a disabled atheist asexual, so at least according to Buzzfeed, my privilege kind of evens out. Here's something you don't know about me though - I am Polish. And Poland is notable for being one of the most invaded and oppressed countries in history. If you're wondering, my ancestors came over to America in the early 20th century, after Europe was ravaged by the first world war. I'm only like a fifth generation American. So, my ancestor is someone who came to America to escape a ravaged homeland looking for a better life (my grandfather said that he literally only had meat once in his life before he came to America), and it's a good thing that he did before World War II. Also, the Polish meat a lot of anti-immigration sentiment when they came to America. Not as bad as the white Irish, who were treated a lot like Mexican immigrants are today. Perhaps worse actually, as many business outright refused to hire them (and once again, many Irish immigrated to the United States to escape tragedy - the Great Potato Famine). Also, bringing up the past to shame people who are alive now has always confused me because I'm also part German, who at one point oppressed Poland. So... my people oppressed... my people, and none of my ancestors were in Europe at the time. I've seen many people speak for groups that they aren't a part of - women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities - and if the people within those groups disagree with them, they assume that those people are brainwashed or that society has programmed them to be that way, like they have no autonomy. I swear, some people who champion women's rights talk like being female is some physical or mental disability. Speaking of disabilities though, all of the assholes who call me a sperg, which is a slur - it's used as a slur, invented to insult a specific group - they don't bother me as much as Autism Speaks, an organization that claims to speak for my group, claims that it has good intentions, might even believe it has good intentions, but it doesn't. By the way, I don't speak for all people with autism, or even all people with Asperger's syndrome. A black person doesn't speak for all black people. A man doesn't speak for all men. And a woman doesn't speak for all women. This tends to be forgotten a lot lately. Equality is a good thing to fight for, but it's like freedom - a glittering generality. No two people have the same definition of equality, and even if they did, they wouldn't have the same method of getting there. Look above for the segregation examples. There are two questions I always ask people who claim to fight for equality (I'll use gender for an example) "in which country are men and women most equal." No country is totally equal between men and women, sure, but someone's got to be closest, right? From there, you can do research to see which laws are biased against/for men, and which laws are biased against/for women. It takes the generality out of the generality, and puts it on a reasonable scale, and you get to see some flaws in their logic. For example, some surveys say that Russia is the most equal in life expectancy - because women live on average ten years longer than men (76 years/65 years), and there are other countries where women live longer than they do in Russia. The most equal country in terms of life expectancy is Mali, where people of both sexes die on average at age 53. On surveys about equality, usually dictatorships rank pretty high because the lives of men and women are equally shit and unfree. Some sources put Finland very high on an equality index. Finland is a very gender unequal country. It has the highest rate of male-only conscription in the world. Every male in the country upon becoming an adult must do six months of military training, community service, or prison. If you want to rank countries by "women's quality of life" fine, but that's not equality. The second question "when will men and women become equal?" If the answer is never, then they must believe that everything they're fighting for is futile and in vain. This gives you a very clear picture of their method to equality. And some of them are very prejudiced, like beating down one group viciously while raising up the other group and praising them for everything they do. They'll say things like "xism is prejudice plus power." What you say to this is "okay, what happens when your group gets power? Is rape no longer hatred of women. Are police shootings no longer hatred of African Americans. Or do you think that your group will never get any power and everything you're doing is futile?" In 20 years, I think the people who follow that train of logic are going to be treated like the raging religious homophobes of the last twenty. And these ideas are going to be laughed at like trickle-down economics. And when push comes to shove, they'll eat each other to prove that they're the good moral ones. You can't fight racism with racism. You can't fight sexism with sexism. For a quick example - affirmative action. Affirmative action is "positive" sexism and racism to let in more of a certain group of people. Let's say it's a medical school. A medical school will only let in a certain number of a certain group of people. The stereotype is that Asian people study the most and don't need any help getting in, and African American people need the most help to get in. So, now the Asian people need to compete harder and get better grades to get into this medical school, while the African American people don't need to try as hard. They can get lower grades and get in. Now, you're a patient who knows what this school has done. You're about to have a very dangerous brain surgery done that has a very significant chance of killing you if done even the slightest bit improperly. And you get the choice of the Asian doctor or the African American doctor - both from this school. Who do you go with? You cannot fight racism with more racism. You cannot fight sexism with more sexism. Hatred only begets hatred. There is no such thing as "hating the right people" Hatred dies out when we come to an understanding. Silence only leads to radicalization, which is bad for everyone. That's enough rambling. Yes, this is all related to The Goode Family somehow. Um... please flame responsibly? This is why I don't like to talk politics. Category:Miscellaneous